CHAPTER 2
Humans, Swamp People, and the Survival Problem
WHAT IF YOU could spend the next six months studying happiness and joy or the next six months studying unhappiness and pain?
It’s a tiny test, but within it lies a measure of our fundamental orientation in everything we do. Are we drawn to good or bad? Do we think more about what we want or what we want to avoid? Do we begin by looking for a solution or a problem?
On the surface this seems like an easy question. Surely the happiness study would be a lot more fun, and the results would be just as useful—if not more useful, since no one is going to want to imitate the behavior of the unhappy.
We know how psychologists have answered this question in real life. A researcher built a database of tens of thousands of psychological studies, separating out the work that was looking for what’s right with people from the work that was looking for what’s wrong. It turns out that psychologists were producing 125 percent more research studies on unhappiness and problems than happiness and solutions.1
The source of our problem-first, bad-news bias is as simple and as old as time. It was fundamental to the caveman 400,000 years ago and to the psychology professor doing research last semester, and is fundamental to everyone you know today. We link an understanding of negative outcomes and danger to our very survival. We are driven to pay attention to what’s wrong professionally, personally, and in everything we care about, from bad weather to the last-second shot that costs our favorite team the game.
At one time this all made sense. If you were focused on the good things in life and ignored the threats, a saber-toothed tiger could eat you for lunch while you were making a list of reasons to be happy. Today, however, this orientation toward danger and fear and problems and negativity stifles our creativity, our ability to find solutions, and ultimately our lives—all in the service of avoiding being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger that went extinct 12,000 years ago. We have let this asymmetry between bad and good persist as an act of self-protection, but now paying attention to danger is a bigger threat to our lives than the danger itself.
* * *
AT ITS PEAK in the late 1990s, Seinfeld was making the NBC television network $200 million in annual profits. In fact, the network was making more money from Seinfeld than from all its other prime-time shows combined. The show was a critical and popular success, holding a unique position as a dominant and dependable force in the ratings, week after week drawing upwards of 20 million viewers and ultimately being named the greatest television series of all time by TV Guide. Years later, key lines from the show still reverberate in popular culture (not that there’s anything wrong with that), and the show remains a mainstay in syndication.
To this day, both star and cocreator Jerry Seinfeld and NBC programming chief Warren Littlefield, who ultimately put the show on the air, keep framed copies by their desks of the very same piece of Seinfeld memorabilia. While for Jerry Seinfeld it’s a lesson in irony, and for Littlefield it’s a lesson in decision making, both have preserved copies of the test audience report measuring reactions to Seinfeld’s pilot episode.
The pilot episode is made for that purpose. An entire, full-scale episode is created to let network executives study whether they think audiences will like the show. Based on the pilot, networks place orders for a full or partial season’s worth of episodes, or they shelve the project completely.
What did the test audience say about Seinfeld? They hated it. They didn’t like the characters, the style, the setting, or the story. George was a “loser” and a “wimp.” Jerry’s life was “boring.” And the Kramer character (then called Kessler) didn’t make sense. Only Elaine escaped the test audience’s derision—because her character hadn’t been created yet. Even the format of the show, featuring short bits of stand-up comedy before and after the story line, bothered the test audience.
Jerry Seinfeld himself derisively describes the test report as demonstrating that the show “didn’t appeal to every genus, from humans to swamp people.” But the report suggested something far worse to the network: The show didn’t appeal to anyone. Brandon Tartikoff, Littlefield’s boss at NBC, read the report and understood immediately that the audience thought Seinfeld was “too Jewish, too New York.”
Littlefield called the test results “weak” and “disastrous.” He thought Seinfeld the person was very funny. He thought Seinfeld the show had enormous potential. But the audience report loomed. “It scared us,” he said.
And that fear was all-encompassing. “There is a bottom line here,” Littlefield said. “We have to think about that. I have to answer for that bottom line. And if I go out on a limb for a show the research says will falter, how do I account for myself?”
Littlefield saw the choice he had to make on Seinfeld as a dangerous problem. If he passed, he was throwing away talent and potential. On the other hand, if he spent good money on a bad show, a show he knew was different from the usual fare and that test audiences were resistant to, he would take the blame. It would be very hard to walk into a boardroom and explain why he made a show based on characters, stories, and a format nobody liked.
Littlefield and his team passed on Seinfeld. Instead, they gave the green light to Sister Kate. “We went with things that had better testing. We chose a nun who took care of orphans over Seinfeld,” Littlefield admits.
Network enthusiasm for Sister Kate and her adorable orphans was such that they ordered a full season of episodes. The sister and her wards were relatable, wholesome, warm. And they were canceled before the first season even ended because the show was painfully mediocre. (Here’s an actual joke from Sister Kate, in which Sister Kate describes her friend, April, who drives slowly: “When the speed limit’s twenty-five, she goes twenty-four!”)
While Sister Kate could not be less threatening or disruptive, the Seinfeld world was full of anger and petty annoyance, desperation and frustration, and just plain weirdness. While Seinfeld once described Seinfeld as the show with no hugging, Sister Kate was the very embodiment of the show that hugs its audience.
“You step back from the situation, and it would be hard to imagine Sister Kate really working. I mean, could this even conceivably be a hit,” Littlefield admits. “But back up to when you are in that moment, and you have a stack of glowing words about one show, and basically loathing for the other, which would you choose?”
That is the lure of the problem. It feels safer. It’s easier to explain. But it closes our minds off to possibilities.
The Seinfeld pilot would ultimately turn up on NBC, not because executives had changed their mind but because they were out of new material from their network shows and traditionally “burned off” dead pilots in otherwise empty summer time slots. Not surprisingly, the single episode of an unknown new show airing without promotion on a random summer night did not attract a big audience.
But the show did gain one fan in Rick Ludwin, the NBC executive in charge of late-night programming and specials. Ludwin saw something in Seinfeld that he didn’t see anywhere else on prime-time television: original humor, not a minor variation on an old formula. Though they had never done anything like this before, Ludwin offered to pay for four additional episodes of Seinfeld out of his late-night budget. With that sliver of an opening, first four episodes, then a half-season, then a full season of the show were ordered, and the show nobody liked became the top-rated comedy on television.
With twenty years to think about how he almost missed airing the greatest moneymaker of his career, Littlefield points to the power of fear. Audience research, he says now, is always going to spit out its first taste of any show that isn’t “easily digestible” or “that tries to be extraordinary and different.” But it’s that extraordinary quality that can draw viewers in and hold on to them. It’s that extraordinary quality that he was in business to find.
Littlefield looks at the Seinfeld research report now and smiles. “It says why no one likes these characters and why the show will never work.” From the biggest mistake he nearly made, he’s learned that you must disregard warnings that leave you incapable of acting. “Forget the research,” he says now. “It’s about a vision.”
The lesson has hardly been absorbed across the industry. Jeff Zucker, who later ran NBC for a decade, warns that Seinfeld would not be possible today on network television. Even if it survived the pilot test debacle, it would not have been given a chance to build an audience. “If it wasn’t a hit immediately, it would be gone,” Zucker said. Why? “No one would have the guts to let it find its way.”
* * *
THE FIRST NIGHT was a celebration of fate. Gina and Kevin had both logged in on the same Thursday evening to play Words with Friends, an online word game similar to Scrabble. Contrary to the name of the game, neither sought out a friend to play against, instead opting for a random opponent. They could be matched up against anyone from anywhere. But the game matched them against each other.
Soon the chat box filled as the two playfully mixed compliments and gentle taunts, dropping word after word into place. After Gina won big by using all seven letters to make the word elation, they both kept hitting the rematch button, and in short order, game one gave way to game two, game three, and game four. By the end of the night, they had made a virtual date to play again. They played and chatted again, moving from conversation about the game to swapping stories about their work and their lives. By the end of the weekend, when they finally got around to discussing where they lived, they were shocked to find out that in a game with an international following, they were only two hundred miles away from each other. Elation was the word on both their minds.
Unlike the research reports on Seinfeld, all indicators were positive. It was easy to move forward.
Three weeks later they met for dinner. It was awkward at first. They were two people who felt connected, yet they were meeting for the first time. They weren’t sure whether this was dinner with a friend or dinner with a stranger. They stumbled a bit looking for conversation, feeling the pressure to fill the spaces that did not seem to exist when the game, the computer, and two hundred miles were between them. Searching for that feeling, that chemistry they had felt before, Kevin half-seriously suggested they fire up Words with Friends and pretend they weren’t sitting three feet away from each other.
Heading back home, Kevin thought that Gina was nice enough but that their real-life selves were just not as well matched as their virtual selves. Gina, on the other hand, saw things quite differently. Kevin arrived home to find several emails from Gina, including one with the subject line “Gina’s list of dinner highlights,” another with a recap of the best words each had played during their old Words matches, and a third declaring that they shared something special.
Kevin was surprised to see that Gina’s perception of the evening, and of everything, was so different from his, and that she had put so much thought into cataloguing every moment they had shared. Kevin was even more convinced, since they saw things so differently, that there really was no future here for the two of them.
Gina did not take the rejection well. After several pleas to change Kevin’s mind, she began a series of unwelcome intrusions into Kevin’s life. She left emails, voicemails, and text messages. She showed up on his doorstep late one night. Gina followed Kevin to a bar where he was meeting friends. Her pleas for a second chance gave way to her issuing vague warnings.
Kevin was petrified. Gina was obviously unbalanced, but would this lead to something worse? Would he come out of his house one day to see the tires on his car slashed? Was she capable of some kind of violence?
By the time Kevin went to court seeking a restraining order, his evidence of harassment included not only voicemails, emails, and texts but a cell phone video recording Kevin made of Gina shouting obscenities at him from the sidewalk in front of his place.
Ultimately, even though the trip to court seemed to snap Gina out of her delusional behavior, the worst effects of the stalking were yet to come.
Kevin found himself a changed person. Once the picture of calm, now he was jittery and nervous. Once confident and warm, now he was distant. “I always feel like someone is watching me. I’m always looking over my shoulder,” Kevin said.
“In a normal life, I never thought about what always being afraid does to a person,” Kevin said. “Almost everything I did, I took for granted. I could do things without a second thought. But when you’re afraid, that’s the only thing that comes easy. It’s the only thing. Everything else is a struggle.”
When Kevin met someone a year later, the relationship held all the promise in the world. Kevin thought this might be the one. They moved in together, and Kevin began thinking that marriage was imminent.
But he had grown accustomed to being on edge, constantly ready to argue and fall into a rage. Kevin saw himself poisoning a relationship he should have treasured. Even waking up in his girlfriend’s arms could induce a brief panic as he momentarily imagined that the person lying next to him must have broken into his home.
“If the point of all this was to make me miserable, it worked better than Gina could have imagined,” Kevin said. “Because she infected every single aspect of my life. In the space of a few months, I lost my relationship, I moved, I lost my peace of mind. I even lost my sense of who I was. That was all cast away in fear and loathing.”
Kevin acted out of a basic survival instinct. He took by far the biggest problem he was facing and gave it sustained attention. And in the process he made it worse. He enlarged the problem. He fed the problem by giving it an active place in his life at a point when it could have been reduced to a bad memory. It started with a self-protective impulse, but it ended with a diminished quality of life.
“You have to start to live again,” Kevin tells himself now.
* * *
YOU HAVE JUST won the lottery. The biggest check you’ve ever seen has just come, and it’s safely in your bank account. It’s the kind of sudden good fortune that people dream about and wish for all their lives.
How happy are you now? Have you ever been happier? Is every part of your life better now? Are your burdens fading away?
We know the answer to these questions, because Philip Brinkman went out and tracked down lottery winners and asked them about their general happiness and their daily joys and frustrations.
For comparison’s sake, he asked the same questions to a second group of people, whose lives were otherwise very similar—except for one thing: Like most people, they had never won the lottery.
Which group do you think is happier, lottery winners or regular people? The answer seems obvious.
But the obvious answer is wrong. Good fortune can be worse than no fortune, as the lottery winners took 10 percent less pleasure from daily life events than ordinary people.2 Even when they were asked how happy they imagined themselves to be in the future, the lottery winners were not more optimistic than ordinary people.
Lottery winners are basically ordinary people with an extra million dollars in their pockets. How can they be no happier than the next person? How can they be less happy? This makes no sense.
But that is how we are wired. Good things, ultimately, are secondary to bad things. Good breaks down over time. We get used to good things, and it raises our expectations. If you spend your lottery winnings on a giant house, at some point it stops being a shockingly large and nice house, and it just becomes your house. And good makes other things seem boring. After you win the lottery, how excited will you be about reading an interesting magazine article or buying a nice pair of pants? Good fades.
Bad things, on the other hand, are always compelling to us. Bad is so compelling to us that even when we have every incentive to value good over bad, we value bad over good.
You are married and you have just agreed to answer some questions about your life and relationship. Really basic stuff. But you and your spouse have to be there at the same time for the interview.
They bring you two into a small room. You sit side by side behind a table, with a researcher on the other side. There’s a two-way mirror behind the researcher. Presumably someone on the other side is taking notes.
The questions are easy. Maybe a bit nosy, but nothing outlandish. Where did you two meet? Who takes out the garbage? How do you like to spend your free time? And so forth.
The researcher wants to hear from both of you, so it can take a while to finish off even a simple question.
Do you smile at your spouse? Do you listen closely? Do you nod? Do you touch your spouse on the hand or shoulder at some point during the interview?
Do you interrupt your spouse to add or correct something? Do you roll your eyes at a criticism or an embarrassing answer? Do you shift uncomfortably in your seat when your spouse goes on talking?
The researchers did not actually care where you met or who puts the trash out. They wanted to know if you were more likely to mimic the friendly behaviors or the unfriendly behaviors of your spouse.
Though everything would be easier in life if you repeated the good more than the bad, in fact we are five times more likely to repeat the unfriendly gestures.3 That means that for every single thing you are doing wrong, you’d better be doing five things right or you are going backwards.
Research also shows that our tendency to focus on what’s wrong is not only out of date as a survival instinct, it has actually become an active burden to the species. For survival purposes, a healthy, fulfilling sex life should produce a thriving relationship, and therefore maximize the likelihood of reproduction. But when a couple’s sex life is good, research shows that accounts for only 20 percent of their relationship satisfaction. When a couple’s sex life is unfulfilling, however, that fact accounts for 75 percent of their relationship dissatisfaction. In other words, good sex doesn’t keep us together, but bad sex drives us apart.4
Negative things mattered more than positive, fear ruled the day, and problems defined life for lottery winners and married couples, for Kevin and for NBC. The primal fear inclination to see bad over good is, at this point, a survival instinct that has survived too long. Letting our natural impulses rule keeps us fearful and down all day long. It would all be more than enough to keep the caveman inside all day. But we have to get out of the cave.
* * *
GOING OUT, HOWEVER, is exactly what proved to be increasingly difficult and frustrating for Claire.
“It sounds ridiculous, I know,” Claire acknowledges. “How can you be reluctant to go out the door after heading out that very same door every day for forty years? But it’s different when you don’t have any place to go.”
Rising from the mailroom to office manager to branch manager to a place on the senior management team at corporate headquarters, Claire had been in the banking industry since the days of passbook accounts and free toasters. She considers herself very fortunate that her entire career provided work she found challenging and useful. “You go around town, and you can’t help but see it,” Claire said. “Everywhere you go you see a business built on a loan from my bank, you see a family moving into a house bought with a mortgage from us, you see customers who lived their lives around the savings they kept with us week after week, year after year.”
Day-to-day in the office, Claire was always a decision maker. “Even when I was just starting out, within weeks I was reorganizing how we filed everything,” she said. “And by the end, I was making decisions that had seven- and eight-figure implications before I had even finished my first cup of coffee.”
Now, her agenda is less compelling.
“I get dressed. I eat breakfast. I seem to be in a hurry to get ready. But for what?” she said. “I’m rushing to go nowhere.”
Making matters worse is the fact that Claire recognizes she is battling against something she should treasure. “What is time? Time is the greatest asset you could possibly have. Even the pharaohs ran out of time. And what I am doing with the greatest asset I could ever have?” she asked. “I’ve turned it into nothing. Worse than nothing. It’s become a threat I have to try to manage, to tame, try to keep it from destroying me. That’s funny, isn’t it, trying to keep existence from destroying me.”
Retirement was once a prospect she had welcomed. On the horizon, it seemed like a series of possibilities. Now that she is actually retired, though, she has trouble recalling what any of them were. Everyone in her life tells her she’s free, while she feels trapped. “Free to do precisely what?” she wonders. “Because I don’t have the slightest idea.”
She looked into joining various groups, but if the crowd was too young she felt like she was the old lady ruining the fun. And if the crowd was too old, she felt like just another old lady lost among all that white hair.
“I just have this recurring feeling that I’m showing up to a party I wasn’t invited to,” Claire said. She yearns for the familiar, for something that feels comfortable to her. “The only thing I can think of is going back to the bank, but I just left there.”
Though she didn’t have a tangible fear like Kevin or the NBC executives, Claire’s problem was just as central a feature of her life. Indeed, once she converted her retirement into a problem, she couldn’t see any way out of it.
“People say, ‘You have the time to do anything, try something new.’ But do you remember that first day of kindergarten feeling? That was sixty years ago for me. I remember it, and it was petrifying. I could either go through that or stay home. So I stay home.”
In any walk of life, having the guts to get past negative reactions, to get past bad news, to get past fear—it opens up a world of possibilities. Indeed, overcoming fear makes it possible to redefine a problem, or even the entire universe.
* * *
THE IMAGE OF Albert Einstein, the most respected physicist in the world, sticking out his tongue like a naughty four-year-old remains striking even now, nearly seven decades after the picture was taken. How can we reconcile our thoughts about a man in possession of such a great mind and such juvenile inclinations?
But that is the wrong question. Flip the question on its head and suddenly the frivolous behavior seems invaluable. After all, are there any great thinkers without some unusual tendencies? Are there any great minds timidly set for conformity?
Though silly and trivial on the surface, the Einstein photo reveals something essential about big ideas and the people who create them. Do you know what Einstein did when he saw that photo for the first time? He didn’t wince or turn away. He didn’t issue a public apology or vow to be more mature. He asked for a copy of the photo. Then he had it cropped so that the focus was entirely on his face—and tongue. And then he had copies printed up as note cards so that when he was moved to jot a note to one of his very learned and dignified colleagues, the person first had to look at Einstein sticking out his tongue.
When Einstein won the Nobel Prize, it was less his speech accepting the award than what he did afterward that illustrates the nature of his ability to cast aside what others assume and see things anew. From Stockholm, Einstein left to visit with his friend Niels Bohr, the noted physicist, in Copenhagen. Bohr met Einstein at the Copenhagen train station and led him to a streetcar that would take them close to Bohr’s home.
They took a seat on the streetcar and quickly fell into deep conversation about their favorite subject, quantum mechanics. By the time Bohr thought to look up, they were at the end of the line, having long since missed their stop. Sheepishly, Bohr led them back onto the streetcar now heading the other way. Resolving to actually get off at the right stop, Bohr nevertheless became so engrossed in discussion with Einstein that when he looked up again they were back where they had started, pulling into the Copenhagen train station. As he led his friend onto the streetcar for a third attempt to go home, Bohr felt ridiculous. “I can well imagine what people were thinking,” Bohr said, assuming that the motorman must have believed that these two men riding back and forth on the streetcar were not right in the head. What was also obvious to Bohr was that it never occurred to Einstein to think, much less worry, that others might see them as odd. Whether it was his theories or even his methods of riding public transportation, Einstein didn’t seek anyone’s approval.
In those tiny moments of Einstein’s life, the essence of his strength was on display. His superpower, as it were, was a willingness to exist inside his own world, losing not a moment trapped inside the fear problem. He could have absolutely fearless thoughts. He could venture down a path no one had ever trod. And he could do it without hesitation because he wasn’t ducking danger and he wasn’t worried about consequences.
Indeed, Einstein saw his own strengths in similar terms. “I am a horse for single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work,” he wrote. Most people, he understood, would have trouble living outside the limits placed by the judgment of others. It takes strength and sometimes requires a willingness to stand well apart from your peers. But by incurring the cost of this distance, Einstein said, “I am compensated for it by being rendered independent of the customs, opinions, and prejudices of others and am not tempted to rest my peace of mind upon such shifting foundations.”
While finding his independence invaluable to his work, Einstein hardly held himself above others. Instead, he argued that we all underestimate our capabilities because we tend to look at ourselves from the wrong angle. “Everyone is a genius,” Einstein said. “But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
THE TAKEAWAY
Fear of the problem knocked Kevin out of his heart and home and kept Claire locked in hers. Fear put Seinfeld on the shelf while NBC invested in the utterly forgettable Sister Kate. And it was the extraordinary absence of the fear impulse that helped make Albert Einstein’s career possible.
Fear of the problem is there. It’s in us all. And where it once kept us from an early death at the hands of predators, today it keeps us from living a full life by putting our biggest problems in the center of our field of vision. It is fear of the problem that makes the bad in our relationships five times more influential than the good. It is primal fear that makes psychologists, who should really know better, who should be able to overcome anachronistic, instinctive tendencies, put twice as much effort into studying what’s wrong with us over what’s right.
Letting fear guide our lives, letting fear put our problems first, is a lot like refusing to climb past the first rung of a ladder when you’re painting a two-story house. It’s safer that way, sure, but only if you don’t actually want to accomplish anything.
TWO FOR THE ROAD: TWO STEPS AWAY FROM THE FEAR PROBLEM
Do something you’ve never done before. What did Neil Young do after he released his first Number 1 hit song “Heart of Gold”? Instead of worrying if he could do it all over again, he went in an entirely new musical direction. “This song put me in the middle of the road,” he said. “Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.” In the process, he sustained a career that has spanned more than four decades. There is such great freedom of thought when you do not limit yourself to what you already know and what you’ve already done. Do something today—anything—that is totally unfamiliar to you.
Eat a candy bar. Instead of fear, we actually think more clearly when we feel a little bit of joy. How easy is that to access? It’s as simple as a piece of candy. Alice Isen and her colleagues did an experiment with medical doctors.5 Half received a small bag of candy filled with miniature Hershey’s chocolate bars. Half did not. She gave all the doctors the same patient file and asked them to offer a diagnosis. The candy eaters were vastly more likely to arrive at the correct diagnosis (chronic active hepatitis), and they also performed better on a test of creativity. Even the tiniest source of joy today will spur you to better ideas.